Teams quick tip: the case of the missing Teams meeting add-in

A few months ago, the ability to schedule a meeting in Teams directly was made available in Outlook, and it’s been a wonderful thing.

What you see in the calendar view in Outlook is options for both Skype Meeting and Teams meeting, as well as in the New menu dropdown when in the inbox view:

I had a short moment of panic when I could no longer see the ability to schedule a Teams meeting, as it had disappeared from Outlook:

I compared my desktop against my Surface Pro and found that they had slight variations in build numbers for both Outlook and Teams so I thought that perhaps a bug had been introduced in a newer build on my desktop. I started checking for missing add-in DLLs, registry keys, scouring the web for blog posts, etc.

Then, Office on my Surface went through some updates and Outlook restarted, and presto: the Teams button was missing too!

Long story short, by process of elimination I found that:

  • If Teams is signed in to your home tenant/account when Outlook opens: the Teams Meeting option is there
  • If Teams sign signed into an external tenant/account when Outlook opens: the Teams Meeting option is not there

I suspect for the average user while Teams is somewhat still new in many organisations this is not an issue as users will reside in their home tenant/account.

However in the scenario where a user is in an external network, shuts down their computer at the end of the day, and comes back in the next day: Teams will join back into the last tenant/account is was connected to, and therefore Outlook won’t show the Teams Meeting add-in. To get this functionality back the user will need to switch back to their home tenant/account, restart Outlook, and then the button will be back.

That being said, hopefully as more people move to using Teams as their primary communication and collaboration tool this will be less of an issue as users will schedule meetings directly from the Teams interface (connected of course to their home tenant/account).


Also published on Medium.


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30 comments

  1. I have exactly the same problem but I do not know what a home tenant/account is… Can you please clarify?

    1. Your home tenant/account is the one for your organisation, it’s shown at the top of the list when you look at switching between tenants/accounts.

  2. Can you give some detail? What is the home/tenant/whatever, how can I find that?

    1. Your “home tenant” is effectively your Office 365 organisation, and where your teams live. I use this term to differentiate between a “guest tenant” which is where you are a guest in another organisation’s Microsoft Teams / Office 365 environment.

  3. Good catch Loryan! We have many users having issues with the Outlook add-in and we are working with Microsoft to solve this problem. Did you escalate this to MS?

  4. Except, I only have the home tenant, no other one and I still do not have the add in. So not sure this is the only reason.

      1. Trying to figure out what has proven to be quite difficult. One person on my team has the add-in on Outlook, and the meetings option in Teams itself, however the other three of us do not have either.

  5. I’m surprised this hasn’t been tackled by Microsoft yet, it’s an infuriating problem and will put people off transitioning from Skype to Teams.

  6. Hi Guys,

    I using my custom script which I deployed via SCCM. Maybe some one will interesting:

    #Force close Microsoft Outlook/Teams
    Stop-Process -Name “Outlook” -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    Stop-Process -Name “Teams” -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

    #Detect Microsoft Teams version/folder
    $RootFolder = “$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin”

    $FolderName = (Get-ChildItem -Path $RootFolder |
    Where-Object { $_.PSIsContainer } |
    Sort-Object |
    Select-Object -Last 1).Name
    $Path = Join-Path $RootFolder $FolderName

    #Registered Teams Dll Files
    & $env:SystemRoot\System32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:user $Path\x64\Microsoft.Teams.AddinLoader.dll
    & $env:SystemRoot\System32\regsvr32.exe /s /n /i:user $Path\x86\Microsoft.Teams.AddinLoader.dll

    exit $LASTEXITCODE

    1. This worked great for me Yev!

      Thank you. MS Teams needs to get this sorted. I only had one account. Thank you both however for taking the time!

  7. Wow, thanks for figuring this out! I was going mad trying to figure out what’s wrong. Going to add-ons didn’t give me anything as Teams was missing all together. Not disabled, not slowed down. Just gone! This solved my problem! Thanks a lot!

  8. We have the Teams installed on RDS. We had some users not loading the Add-In in Outlook 2016.
    Seemed those users were missing the registry keys for Outlokk Add-In:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\outlook\addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect]
    “Description”=”Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office”
    “FriendlyName”=”Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office”
    “LoadBehavior”=dword:00000003

  9. I proceed exactly with adding registry but when I restarted Teams, the registry key disappeared

  10. Hi ,
    I have the same issue? but i’m my case I think it’s because, I used another tenant (with another account) and now Outlook no longer switch back to my account.

  11. Hi, I’ve the same problem but nothing works.
    the difference (I think) is that I have used Teams with another tenant account of another organisation (So a second “home account”) and after I switch back Teams account with the account used in outlook

    thanks for any help

    1. Basically have Outlook start when Teams is signed in to the right tenant that matches the mailbox, then it’ll work.

  12. For those that keep asking about Switching Tenants.
    Its the dropdown right next to your picture in the teams app. I’m not sure why someone has not said that yet.

    1. I haven’t said it because if you don’t know what it means then it probably doesn’t apply.

  13. I d like to use Teams addin with Outlook 2016 Home and Bussiness, and spent a lot of time to start it, but without success, I finally start troubleshooter – MS SARA tool to resolve and it informed me that i have not compatible version of Office to use teams addin and should upgrade (funny notice is that tool shows information as addin work only with Outlook 2013, 2016,2019). Does someone any details about version should I get to have the add-in visiible and up ? (currently it does not exist on addins list after Teams installation ), thanks

    1. I don’t think my solution relates to your scenario. I would suggest changing your version of Outlook 2016 Home and Business to the enterprise version as part of an Office 365 E3 or Microsoft 365 Business subscription.

  14. Try my script it should ensure the plugin is registered and the registry is correct relating to it
    just ensure you specify the directory name of the plugin in the script in the appropiate place before running as stated. All the best Raz

    ———————

    @echo off
    rem Ensure the Teams plugin DIRECTORY name is correct in the
    rem line specified set addin=xxxxxxx before running
    rem —————————–
    set addin=1.0.21063.3
    rem —————————–

    set errorlevel=0
    cd /d “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin\%addin%”
    if errorlevel 1 goto sorry

    title Registering Teams v1.0.21063.3 for Outlook
    echo.
    echo ===========================================
    echo NOTE Attempting to run from – %cd%
    echo ===========================================
    echo Automatically closing Outlook and Teams in a few seconds before starting..
    timeout 10

    :stopoutlook
    echo Stopping Outlook if running..
    set errorlevel=0
    tasklist | find “OUTLOOK.EXE”
    if errorlevel 1 goto stopteams
    taskkill /im OUTLOOK.exe /t /f
    ping localhost > nul
    set errorlevel=0
    tasklist | find “OUTLOOK.EXE”
    if errorlevel 0 goto stopoutlook

    :stopteams
    echo Stopping Teams if running..
    set errorlevel=0
    tasklist | find “Teams.exe”
    if errorlevel 1 goto regteams
    taskkill /im Teams.exe /t /f
    ping localhost > nul
    set errorlevel=0
    tasklist | find “Teams.exe”
    if errorlevel 0 goto stopteams

    :regteams
    Reg.exe add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\outlook\addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect” /v “Description” /t REG_SZ /d “Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office” /f
    Reg.exe add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\outlook\addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect” /v “FriendlyName” /t REG_SZ /d “Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office” /f
    Reg.exe add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\outlook\addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect” /v “LoadBehavior” /t REG_DWORD /d “3” /f

    “%SystemRoot%\System32\regsvr32.exe” /n /i:user “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin\%addin%\x64\Microsoft.Teams.AddinLoader.dll”
    “%SystemRoot%\System32\regsvr32.exe” /n /i:user “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin\%addin%\x86\Microsoft.Teams.AddinLoader.dll”

    :finished
    cls
    exit

    :sorry
    set errorlevel=0
    echo Sorry the directory %addin% is not available. Update the script
    echo with the correct sub directory name under TeamsMeetingAddin then re-run.
    echo.
    dir “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin”
    if errorlevel 1 cls & echo Sorry problem with Teams, try re-install
    echo.
    pause
    goto finished

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